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We’re not poor any more. We can pay to have some things done for us.” “I want to stay poor, then,” said Katie, “because I like to use my hands.”
“Then I’ve been drunk, too,” admitted Francie. “On beer?” “No. Last spring, in McCarren’s Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.” “How’d you know it was a tulip if you’d never seen one?” “I’d seen pictures. Well, when I looked at it, the way it was growing, and how the leaves were, and how purely red the petals were, with yellow inside, the world turned upside down and everything went around like the colors in a kaleidoscope—like you said.
“Gosh, Sissy. Must you have the last word?” “Yes. Just like your mother has to have it, and Evy and you, too.” Francie made no more objections.
But she didn’t want to recall things. She wanted to live things—or as a compromise, re-live rather than reminisce.
She decided to fix this time in her life exactly the way it was this instant. Perhaps that way she could hold on to it as a living thing and not have it become something called a memory.
“let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
I’d be a dried-up old maid of twenty-five before I was finished.” “Whether you like it or not, you’ll get to be twenty-five in time no matter what you do. You might as well be getting educated while you’re going towards it.”
“My grandparents never knew how to read or write. Those who came before them couldn’t read or write. My mother’s sister can’t read or write. My parents never even graduated from grade school. I never went to high school. But I, M. Frances K. Nolan, am now in college. Do you hear that, Francie? You’re in college! “Oh gosh, I feel sick.”
Nonsense! Send the card if you feel like it. I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life’s too short.
a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone—just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”
“I wouldn’t need to think of an excuse. I’d tell her the truth.” “You would?” he asked in astonishment. “I love you. I wouldn’t be ashamed…afterwards if I stayed with you. I’d be proud and happy and I wouldn’t want to lie about it.”
he asked for her whole life as simply as he’d ask for a date. And she promised away her whole life as simply as she’d offer a hand in greeting or farewell.
“It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold.
Your whole life might have been ruined. As your mother, I tell you the truth. “But as a woman…” she hesitated. “I will tell you the truth as a woman. It would have been a very beautiful thing. Because there is only once that you love that way.”
Dear Ben: you said I was to write if ever I needed you. So I’m writing…. She tore the sheet in half. “No! I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me…I want someone to need me.”
